Mercy, I pray you, Mercy
by k4writer02
Summary: Helen learns different ways to pray. An introspective look at Helen Donnelly, through the deaths and injuries of the men she loves most—her father, her brother, her husband, and her sons.


Title: Mercy, I Pray You, Mercy

Author: Kate, k4writer02

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: Did I write Crash? Did I grow up in Hell's Kitchen? No. So I don't own the Black Donnellys, and I'm not profiting off this story.

Summary: Helen learns different ways to pray. An introspective look at Helen Donnelly, through the deaths and injuries of the men she loves most—her father, her brother, Harold, her husband, Bobby, and her sons, Jimmy and Sean.

Author's Note: Kyrie Eleison means "lord have mercy." It was sung in Latin in Masses before 1965 and Vatican II, and in some parishes, they still use Latin for that part.

Go ndéana Dia trócaire air is Gaelic for "God have mercy on him."

Also, I don't have a beta. If anyone wants to volunteer for the job, I'd be extremely grateful. Concrit is welcome from everyone, though!

Helen's Mam taught her the first way to pray. They went to Mass every Sunday—in Latin first, then, after Vatican II, in English. The priest had a brogue, and Ireland lilted in his immigrant's voice, as he preached self-sacrifice and duty and better things to come.

Helen learn to raise her voice in "Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison" before she understood what mercy was, or why she would ask for it, when there's been so little of it in her life.

Helen was born in this country, the last of six, and a girl to boot. Her parents had come from the north of Ireland, seeking opportunities and a new life away from poverty and the violence between Protestant and Catholic. Seeking a place, the grown Helen thinks, where Pop wasn't known to every pub and tavern, where the bill collectors wouldn't hound Mam.

They didn't find their haven in Hell's Kitchen—Pop drank, and the family was poor and as to violence? That's best left unspoken.

Helen learned to pray, in the pews of the cold, grand church, and at home, kneeling next to Mam, elbows on the seat of a chair, fingers on the rosary, repeating "Holy Mary, mother of God" (she could believe in that) and "Our Father, who art in heaven," and "Glory be to the father" and "Go ndéana Dia trócaire air" until she knew the rhythms of the prayer better than the beat of her mother's heart.

She stopped believing in the prayers, after Pop drank himself to a violent grave. Then, though she still knelt with Mam and Maureen and whatever sisters and brothers were there, "Our Father who art in heaven" became "Our father, who aren't in heaven" and she skipped the father, going straight to "Glory be to the son." And when she says "Go ndéana Dia trócaire air," she's talking about Harold and her brothers, but not Pop.

Mam and Maureen ignored it—but Harold, her favorite brother, noticed, and he tugged on her hair and said, "Helen, Pop's better off."

And Helen, who would believe Harold if he told her that she could click her heels together and fly, tried to believe in God and a heavenly father.

She learns another kind of prayer at home, and in the church, the prayer of communion, of breaking bread around the table. In the Mass, the Communion wafer dissolves on her tongue, uniting her with the congregation in a single meal. At home, they break bread, and eat potatoes and turnips and cabbage and sometimes, beef. It is sacred to Mam, the time at the table, the sharing of a meal. It's a time for stories and laughter and family, a time when the mother and sisters serve the brothers, and they are all together.

When Harold is shot, by accident, outside the bar the Farrells own, Helen learns a new way to pray.

Harold was still a boy, barely seventeen, and he was working for nickels and dimes, running errands for the Farrells, trying to make enough to make ends meet. Because the three oldest boys were as useless as Pop was, as Jimmy is becoming. Drink, women and drugs; gambling, violence and despair. These things poisoned Helen's men—her father, brothers, sons. Even her husband.

Helen was fifteen and pretty enough, but not beautiful in a way that made men stare at her and follow her home (that's Maureen, older than Harold by ten months, and so pretty Mam doesn't let her leave the apartment alone, for fear of what might happen). Mam couldn't take time from work; Maureen couldn't stop the piecework.

So Helen stopped going to school, and she stayed at the hospital with Harold. She learned from the nurses how to make the bed (don't tuck the blankets in, girl, in case we have to take it off fast), how to measure his temperature (because of the breathing tube, can't use his mouth, and don't want to stick it in his ass because then you have to roll him; the ears aren't reliable if there's congestion, so you tuck it in his elbow while they measure his blood pressure and heartbeat). She learned how to put on the cuff so it didn't hurt him or chafe him; she learned how to clean the IV site, where the needle that's nourishing him attaches. She learned how to put the bedpan under him, where to get rid of it. Where the extra blankets are.

There was nothing she wouldn't do for this brother, and that's not just Mam's teaching, not just the world she grew up in, where the boys always served themselves first and the girls did their laundry and dishes and chores and asked for nothing. It's not conditioning. It's love, love for this brother, and faith in him.

While she cared for Harold's broken body, Helen learned to pray from her heart. Harold had three gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen, none of them meant for Helen's brother, but the gunner didn't care, shot the errand boy because Collin Farrell and his sons were protected. He would wake, for a short time, usually just long enough to make eye contact with Mam or Helen or one of their other brothers or sisters, and then he passes out again.

Helen tried begging, using the words from the Mass. "Kyrie eleison. God, please, please, please, have mercy. For my Mam, who's a good woman, with three useless sons, please, let her keep the good one. You gave her a good-for-nothing Paddy to husband, and she took him, and she visits your house twice a week. She's a good woman. Please.

"Christe eleison. Lord Jesus, while you were on Earth, you had pity on widows. You healed the sick. Harold's done nothing, he was in the wrong place, wrong time. Isn't he as worthy as the lame and the sick and the blind you touched? Please, Lord, oh, please Jesus, give us mercy. Give us a miracle. Kyrie eleison."

She sniffles a little while she's praying it, and Harold moves a little and Helen thinks, "My God, he's waking up!" She hastily wipes her eyes and nose—no need for him to see a tear-stained face—and begins to praise God…but Harold wasn't waking. He was choking on the blood that had been seeping into his lung since the bullet grazed it.

They moved him to a ward, where she worked on him and for him until the day he died.

Helen didn't talk to God for years after that. She may've moved her lips at funerals and weddings and Christmas and Easter, but she didn't get on speaking terms with the almighty again until she turned eighteen and celebrated with Bobby Donnelly in the backseat of a car that belonged to one of his friends. The orgasm that ripped through her had her crying to Jesus, and well, since he'd thrown such a fine man her way, it couldn't hurt to say thank you, now could it?

Bobby Donnelly. Now there was a man. A steel worker, with wide, strong shoulders and narrow hips, and a broad back. His hands were the size of shovels, but they touched her like she was his very own Saint Brigid, woken out of plaster and come alive.

She wore white at their wedding, and she prayed simply that day, "thank you." She didn't ask for anything at all, just said thank you.

They had four sons, and she thanked the Lord for each one—for James, for Thomas, for Kevin, for Sean. She and Bobby weren't rich but they made ends meet. Barely, most months, but ends met. She lived six blocks from Maureen and her husband, two blocks from Mam and her three oldest brothers.

There were small tragedies, and large joys, and then Jimmy's leg got run over and Helen returned to the hospital. She had to deal with a frightened, angry child and his brothers. She tried bargaining with God that time, "Let my son live, if you only let him walk again, I will never miss another Sunday Mass."

And Jimmy learns to walk again (with a limp, but he lives and he walks and if he isn't quite her shining boy, well, what does it matter?) She goes to Mass every week, and strange, it's Tommy who goes with her. Tommy, who'd left her at her wits end, between boosting cars and sneaking around with Jenny Reilly. But her second son had reformed, almost like he made his own bargain, though whether it's with God or the devil, Helen can't say.

Tommy looked haunted and dark some minutes, and innocent as an altar boy other times, and Helen is too busy remembering everything she learned from Harold's fight to live to puzzle out her suddenly well-behaved second son. She tells herself Tommy stopped boosting cars because he saw the effects of an out-of-control driver and Helen doesn't let herself think any deeper than that.

Whatever time isn't sucked up by Jimmy and making him better goes to Seanie, her baby. She can't help loving the fourth son best, can't help thinking that he'll be like Harold, the best of the lot. She worries, some days, that Tommy and Kevin have been left alone, but there's Jenny Reilly to comfort Tommy, and that strange boy, Joey, to chase Kevin around.

Helen thinks of Joey as the Eddie Haskell to her sons' Wally and Beaver. Only less wholesome. Joey is about as sincere and deep as the "I'm sorry" the doctor said to her when he got to Harold's bed too late, when she wrapped him in a sheet and she saw blood-flecked foam on his face. Yet if she wanted to know what trouble her boys were in, she'd go to Joey. The kid knew everything, near enough.

The thing was, Helen Donnelly didn't want to know. What she didn't know about the boys' hijinks wouldn't hurt them, and right then Jimmy needed her most.

Helen keeps her bargain faithfully, not always believing, but always in the pew: kneeling, sitting, standing, humming, listening, replying.

Helen learned another way to pray when Bobby died. She learned to move her fingers over the rosary beads, her mind over the words, until she was blank of anything but "Hail Mary, full of grace."

This, she thought, was the prayer Mam wanted to teach her daughters, the calm of meditation, the belief that moving your hands and your lips will do something when your man is gone beyond the veil and you are left with his children to raise and a life to lead, even though you don't see a reason to get out of bed or a reason to shower, or get dressed, or eat.

She still went to Mass every Sunday, because a bargain's a bargain, and you can't change the terms whenever you wish, and there's one being who won't renegotiate. Ever. At all.

She learned the rite of the Mass, how to ask for mercy and break bread and how to say the rosary, she learned to pray from her heart (beg from it, say thank you from it), she learned to bargain with God, and she learned to meditate.

This latest time in the hospital? With Sean, her youngest, her brightest, her bonny lad, lying in a bed, beaten and bleeding inside, where she can't stop it. And these nurses don't let her help, don't let her bathe his body or note the measurements on the chart. Here, she prays by breaking bread with her sons and neighbors, by clearing her mind with the rosary.

Bargaining seems to be the only way of praying that's ever worked for her, because she knows that begging for mercy isn't the way. Appealing to God's sense of fairness? Don't make her laugh. It might break something in her widow's heart.

This time, Helen tried threatening and bargaining. "God, you had better let my boy live. Without any pain, without scars. You owe me. You took Harold from me. You cut my time short with Bobby, and you crippled Jimmy. I have served you anyway. I go to your house, like I promised. But now, I need to know that there is such a thing as mercy. And if you are any kind of loving God at all, you'll let my son live. Don't you dare take him." She takes a deep breath, says, loud "Go ndéana Dia trócaire air!"

Helen knows that this kind of prayer is not respectful and that it may even be blasphemous. She prays it anyway.


End file.
